Will you read this? I think maybe it sucks. Or maybe it's awesome. It's probably awesome. Tell me it's awesome, okay? Unless it sucks." — Nick

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.

Smiling is confusing, she thought. This is why I don’t do it.

Months are different in college, especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they're like dog months.

I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.

Emergency dance party--go away.

I don't like hello. It makes me sound like I have dementia, like I've never heard a phone ring before and I don't know what's supposed to happen next. Hello?

You flirt with everything." She could tell that her eyes were popping-- her eyeballs actually felt cold around the edges. "You flirt with old people and babies and everybody in between.

She was tired of being the one who cried.

I cannot be broken. I cannot be killed. I cannot fail. This is my identity. This is my core. I am infinite. I am permanent. I am unbreakable.

Why do I keep evading my work? Is it because I’m afraid of being confronted by my lack of abilities?

The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.

No mother in the world wants her daughter to have fewer rights than she did...

By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one

I have the infinite galaxy from '2001 as my screensaver - so if I space out while I'm writing and it goes to screensaver, I can just stare off into the stars.

In playing the part of Mammy, I tried to make her a living, breathing character, the way she appeared to me in the book

The very, very first thing that I wanted was to make a living - be independent and have a job. It might have come later, that kind of reaction to the boringness of fashion.

Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later.